“Louise Ellman, Robert Halfon and Luciana Berger walk into a bar…each orders a round of B52s … #Gaza”.

Ellman, Halfon and Berger all happen to be Jewish.

Amnesty’s subsequent disciplinary investigation found that tweet “ill-advised and had the potential to be offensive and inflammatory but was not racist or antisemitic”. Benedict was merely made to apologise.

A year earlier Amnesty made Benedict apologise for physically threatening me after I questioned Benedict’s guest presenter Abu Dheer who produced to an Amnesty audience the following very possibly fake photo of a young Palestinian boy with a Star of David allegedly carved into his arm by an Israeli soldier using broken glass.

Benedict called me a “war crimes denier” for questioning the photo and then threatened me physically.

As you can see, the Star of David is too perfect to have been made by broken glass on a screaming boy’s arm and the plaster doesn’t cover the supposed wound properly.

Now Benedict has compared Israel to Islamic State, also known as ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant), with this tweet:

#JSIL means “Jewish State in the Levant”, a sickening comparison to the murderous ISIL.

Obviously, not on any level can Israel be compared to Islamic State but in the prevailing febrile anti-Israel atmosphere Israel is now regularly being compared so alongside the usual comparisons to Nazism and apartheid South Afria.

So this latest tweet by Benedict, sadly, comes as no surprise. Maybe Amnesty will carry out yet another investigation and make him apologise a third time. Who knows.

But Amnesty does itself a disservice by continuing to employ Benedict. When considering his “JSIL” tweet, his B52 “joke” and his theatening behaviour in response to the questioning of that fake photo why would anyone seeking objectivity take seriously any report that Amnesty produces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Last night one thousand anti-Israel protesters swarmed towards the Israeli Embassy in London after Israel had begun its legal (in international law) defensive operations against the hundreds of Hamas rockets being fired at Israel from Gaza. Not a word was spoken by them against Hamas despite the horrors Hamas inflicts on both Israelis and Gazans. A nasty atmosphere was heightened by dozens of young women and men with their faces half-covered. Were they Occupy protesters looking for a new cause now that movement is defunct? (see photo below)

If only the Stop The War Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign would mobilise such numbers to protest the brutalities taking place in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Lebanon and Turkey, but there seems to be a general apathy towards murder and oppression in those places. It’s only the Jewish state rightly defending itself (with the full support of America and Britain) that really brings the protesters out onto the streets of London. Chants included “No Justice No Peace, Israel Out the Middle East”, “Zionism, You Will Pay” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free”, as you can hear:

The words aren’t about settlements, Jerusalem or, even, the Palestinians, but simply call for the total destruction of the Jewish state.

Meanwhile, 400 Israel supporters, mobilised by the Zionist Federation and the British Israel Coalition, called for peace and sang “Long Live Israel”, “Am Yisrael Chai” and the British and Israeli national anthems.

Wishing you a Shabbat shalom and/or a peaceful weekend, especially for the people of Israel and Gaza (excluding Hamas).